Years to Come
by Whiggity
Summary: The last night of October is crisp and beautiful. The brothers don't get to see each other as often as they'd like to anymore, but neither of them would miss this for the world.


When Greg reached the base of the wall, he was beginning to perspire to the point of visibility. He slowed to a stop and took a moment to recompose himself next to the oak tree before calling up, "I'm here!"

"I can hear you," Wirt's voice drifted down in response. "You breathe like a Basset hound." Greg had not the energy in body or spirit to shoot back that Basset hounds are wonderful and loyal pets and _thank you_ for such a nice compliment, so he pressed his back to the cold stone wall and breathed as doggishly as he needed to. It wasn't yet full dusk, with the sun still in yellow bloom, but the color was beginning to close. Tombstone shadows spread long and deep toward him, and he lifted a hand to protect his eyes from the low radiance of the sky. He was so late.

"You are so late," Wirt called to him, in perfect time.

Greg shouted back up, "I know! I know," and turned to step up the oak's jutting roots. The old tree's trunk, halfway grown into the cemetery wall, was knotted by decades of hands seeking purchase in the same places. "Nadine asked me to stay for the trick-or-treaters, her dad does this setup on the porch where he pretends to be a scarecrow and when kids take more than one candy from the bowl he – _oof."_ He strained to pull himself atop a thick branch halfway up the trunk. "But I said – _puff –_ I said noo, honey dearest, I've got places I need to be tonight, my lousy ungrateful brother is waiting for me… I didn't say that part, but –" He grabbed the limb that overreached the top of the wall and swung his legs up over the stone.

Wirt sat with his back to the setting sun, facing out toward the shadow-drenched field and railway outside the graveyard. He gave his brother a sidelong look as he settled down at his side. "Who's Nadine?"

"Oh, yeah. I've been seeing her since the beginning of the year." He scooted himself leftward along the rough stone to close the distance between the two of them. "The department put on a Christmas party for the performing arts students. She started beatboxing with the acapella kids and I got really into it – I guess that's not important. I asked her out and things are going pretty good."

"No, that sounds like a nice story. Congratulations." Wirt pressed a gentle elbow into Greg's shoulder. "Glad you made it, by the way. You look… good." Greg wiggled his eyebrows and flexed, only half-jokingly. "You're big. Every time I see you, you're different."

"I don't even work out! It just happens on its own." Tenderly he kissed his bicep. Wirt turned away with a grin. He, contrarily, had changed very little, long-faced and big-eared as ever, with the same unkempt hair that had been his main point of friction with Greg's father for ten years. "That's a good look on you," Greg offered. He tugged on the sleeve of his brother's brown wool overshirt, rolled up to the elbows. "What would you call it? Barnyard-chic?"

Wirt tugged his arm away. "Very funny. It's practical."

"No, I mean it! You got married and found fashion. No more suspenders for this guy."

"I still wear suspenders. What?" He watched Greg laugh into his hand. "What's so funny?"

"Nothing! Nothing. Ah, man, I missed you!" He patted his big brother's shoulder, and Wirt squawked at the force. "So how's the family?"

"Um, you know, they're good." Wirt rubbed the arm that had buckled under Greg's clap. "Yeah, they're – they're good."

Greg waited patiently for elucidation. "What a story!"

"Well, I don't know. I guess I there's not a lot to say." He paused. "Her dad's been showing me how to make dowels."

"Wooow."

"Yeah, it's not exciting."

Greg gave him a kindly look. "Dowels can't be the sum total of this new chapter of your existence."

"You're telling me." Wirt's eyes fell into the middle distance, as if he were considering saying something, but he pursed his lips and instead swung his legs up onto the wall to face Greg. He leaned over his knees and shielded the right half of his face from the sun with a hand. "How about you, though?"

Greg shrugged languidly. "Pretty normal."

"You've got to have more for me than that."

"I'll be graduating in May." Wirt perked up when he heard that. "Uh, Dad said he wants to rent me a skiff so I can sail to the Bahamas?"

"You want to do that?"

"It's what he did after college. He projects, you know how he does that." Greg sat back on his arms with a sigh. The eastern sky ahead of them deepened from blue, at the edges, to rich purple along the horizon. Sunlight still poured over the wall and down the hillside below them, but it was growing thinner, soaking away into the grass. The lake at the base of the hill shimmered gently. "Then after that? I dunno. 'Congratulations, here's your theater degree, try not to starve to death.' Maybe I'll join the circus."

Wirt said, "Graduating college, though. I'm really proud of you." Greg shot him a smile. "I didn't do much for my graduation. I went to Baltimore."

Greg remembered. He had been twelve, finally old enough to start taking mental notes on each step toward adulthood his brother made ahead of him, for future reference. "Everyone told me that was not the traditional choice."

"Sara's aunt was willing to put us up and – it was a pretty nice trip."

"Normal people go to Europe or something."

"Normal people must have money. _I_ had private loans for a music education."

"You are so damned practical –"

"In all things but choice of college major."

"– we've needed that at home. When you're not around to be a bummer, Mom and Dad spend their retirement doing stuff like bungee jumping and volunteering in Guatemala."

"Are you kidding?" Greg was not. Wirt pressed his fingers to his temple. "That is _so_ dangerous."

Greg had it on the tip of his tongue that driving a car carried significant statistical risk too, but decided against saying so. He looked at his brother for a moment and tried to let go of the tension he hadn't realized he was carrying in his shoulders. "How is Sara?" Wirt asked. "Have you seen her around?"

"Oh, yeah. I mean, no. Not for a while. She lives in the city now." Wirt nodded absently. "But sometimes I do. We don't talk about you, since… you know." He paused. "I still think she'd take it well if she knew –"

Wirt shook his head, shamefaced. "No," he mumbled. "That would be… No. Keep it a clean break."

"It's plenty clean," Greg insisted. "I heard she's engaged again. She has a job she really likes… She's doing okay." A glimmer of real affection showed on his brother's face, before he masked it with a glibly regretful smile.

"That's good," he said. "I'm glad for her."

Neither of them spoke for a little while. Greg rolled his head back along his shoulders to squint at the sunset, and then bowed forward again with a hand over his blinded eyes. Wirt still sat facing his brother on the wall, but his gaze was on the eastern fields. His fingers worried a small nubbin on the leg of his trousers. "So what else has been going on with you?" he asked. "A whole year, there has to be more to tell."

Greg said, "Nothing big, really. The big stuff is all still coming. You?" Wirt made a noncommittal gesture with his head. "How's married life?"

"We're good! Yeah, we're surprisingly good." Once again, his attention drifted into nothing and the ghost of great excitement brushed his lips, but pulled it back into a polite smile. "Her family, haha, they, uh, all want you to come back to visit sometime. I don't think they really –"

Little-brother intuition strummed a chord in Greg's head. "There's something you're not saying."

"Huh?"

"Yeah! You keep getting a look. See, you're sort of doing it right now. What's going on?"

The inscrutable look surfaced again and Wirt bit his lip. "I'm not supposed to tell –"

"Well, now you've said that, you _have_ to."

"It's too soon to share. Mrs. Miller said –"

"Said what? She said what?!"

Wirt made a gesture of surrender. "Okay! We're…" Agonizingly, he stopped again and put a hand over his mouth.

Greg waited, he thought, very patiently. The oak limb above their heads rattled in the settling breeze. "…Well?"

"I almost said 'we,'" Wirt muttered into his hand. "I hate when people say 'we.' _She's_ pregnant, _we_ are not –"

Greg almost fell off of the wall. "Are you joking!" he yelped, digging his fingers into the stone for stability. Wirt shot him a bashful look. "You're not! You're not joking! Ha ha ha, holy crap!" He slapped his brother on the back, so hard he knew it was going to hurt, but it was the only immediate way he had of grounding the electric delight in his stomach. "Oh my God, since when?!"

"Um, last month, it looks like." Wirt rubbed the back of his head with a furious blush across his cheeks. "It's still so early and you're not supposed to tell in case anything goes wrong…"

"You _have_ to tell me these things! Oh my God, what else were you going to do – show up next year with a _baby_ like, 'Surprise, brother o' mine, look what I've been up to' –?" Wirt was laughing, and Greg's sheer excitement rendered him as flushed as his sibling. He sat for a second with his eyes on the lake at the base of the hill, trembling in anticipation.

"I'm gonna uncle the crap out of this," he announced. "Even if I have to do it from a distance, that baby is gonna _know_ Uncle Greg is out there, cultivating life advice his parents will object to –"

"Greg, it's too soon to be –"

"Noo," he moaned, and slung a leg over the wall so he could drape himself atop it with false melancholy. "Don't stop me now, Wirt. God, I'm so happy. Congratulations, seriously."

"Thanks, Greg." Wirt couldn't subdue his smile either. "Me too. I'm honestly really, really… good." Greg's heart swelled. There had been so many tearful thunderous nights, almost half a lifetime ago now, when even he truly feared his brother would never feel happiness again. But the bad times never last; all his experience bore that out. The highway-wide rift that separated Wirt from their parents had not been insurmountable for the siblings. Life was strange and good.

He made a pillow of his arms behind his head and looked to the sky past the oak tree, gilt in the west and bruised to the east. The brightest stars already peeked through in the darkest parts of the atmosphere, and towering clouds edged the horizon like mountains. "It's such a nice evening," he observed. Wirt made a noise of agreement. "Was kinda cloudy this morning, but it got really nice." Then he said nothing again for a few minutes as he deliberated. "Hey, Wirt?"

"Hmm?"

Greg had thought he was ready to make his suggestion, but he faltered. Somewhere on the graveyard side of the wall, an owl hooted. "…Mom deserves to know." He could not see his brother over the mound of his knees, and they had no bodily contact between them, but he still sensed when Wirt heard him and grew still. Greg licked his lips and waited for a response, staring upward without blinking. None came until he sat back up.

"We've talked about this." Wirt's eyes were locked on the train tracks below them, and the humor had evaporated from his voice and left it dry and cracked. He would not look up.

Greg hunched over his lap. "Yeah, and I always gave in then, but this…" Wirt blinked guardedly. "She'd want to know. No matter anything else."

"Please don't."

"I know it's still really raw, but –"

 _"Stop."_ Wirt turned back to him with great emphasis, knuckles white around his knees. "Please, Greg, don't –" His shoulders rose and fell at a quickening pace until he cut himself off from speaking. He didn't finish his thought, and he didn't need to. It wasn't as though they hadn't had this argument before.

Greg turned away. Lights shone in the windows of the houses on the hill. The mass of the sun of had almost dropped behind the pine ridge on the west end of town, and in its dying throes sought to set the sky on fire behind it. He watched as it pressed its belly to the earth, and dutifully reported, "It's a beautiful sunset."

Wirt responded, "I'm sure it is," not without an abrasive edge. His upset broke Greg's resolve; this was no way to spend their time. Wearily, he reached out to take his brother around the shoulder.

"Ah, look at us," he announced, and shook Wirt's bony frame in a demonstrative fashion. "We're getting old."

"Don't 'we' me," Wirt said, still stiff, but now more by way of tiredness than agitation. "I don't need you to make me feel better."

"Come on, let's not fight," Greg said. "This time next year I'll be as much of a starving artist as you ever were. I don't know about you, but I _like_ being able to relate to my only brother."

"More and more every year," Wirt agreed, but not in the spirit Greg had intended. "You're catching up. What happens when you hit twenty-six?"

Greg waved the question away. "Age is but a number. I don't want a family anyway, so you'll always have that on me."

"You're lying so you don't have to think about it," Wirt muttered.

Greg was always impressed by how incisive his brother could be, except at the times when it was inconvenient for him. "No, I mean it," he insisted. "I'm a free spirit, man. Kids aren't for me. But you should have truckloads." Wirt smirked for the first time in a while, and Greg found his opening. "Babies for days. Enough children that you start letting me name them and you don't care that I can't be responsible with that kind of power. 'Zephyr.' 'Boisduval.' 'Toaster Strudel.'" Wirt rubbed his mouth to conceal his expanding smile. "An army of my thoughtlessly-named niblings. When they got made fun of at school, their angst could be weaponized."

"You're right," Wirt murmured, "you shouldn't have kids," and Greg roared with laughter and slapped his knee. Above their heads, the last orange was leaving the sky. Greg watched it go out with the sun's flame, and as every year, gestured so that his brother might finally turn all the way to look out over the Eternal Garden.

Wirt's shoulders sloped as he passed his gaze over the tombstones, the rolling grounds, the fence and the streetlight glow and the dark shapes of homes and trees beyond the light. Kids were starting to make commotion out on the street. He slung his elbow over one raised knee and let the other leg dangle, kicking idly at the stone wall. "Home sweet home," he mused. "It never changes."

"Nah," Greg said amenably. "It's good bedrock to have beneath you, I think." He paused. "You miss it?"

"Of course. More every year." Dusky light brought out the shadows under Wirt's eyes. He opened his mouth to say something, and then licked his lips and visibly changed his mind.

"Greg," he began, "you… you know that I want to tell Mom, too." His voice was hoarse. "But I just don't know what would happen. She'd want to see me. What if –?"

Greg said in a low voice, "I know."

"I'm worried I might not be able to come." Wirt looked between the Edwards mausoleum at the top of the hill and the decorative pond at the bottom of it. "I'm so afraid of breaking something. Maybe these nights are only supposed to be for you." Prominently, he swallowed. Greg put an arm around his shoulders. "I want it all back," he continued, a tad shaky. "I wish you could bring every one of them with you and make a – a parade through town, and I could come out before the sun goes down and shake everybody's hands as they pass by. But that wouldn't –" He pressed a fist to his mouth and shot his brother a watery glance. "I definitely can't do that."

"I know," Greg said again, and reinstated the embrace more firmly. Wirt was so solid next to him. Taller, though growing relatively less so at haste. Older, but the gap between them shortened every day. They only had a handful of Halloweens remaining before they finally traded places from what they had always known of each other; Greg would be the one left with tales still to tell about the newness of his experience in the world, while a brother who had lived fewer years than himself listened and tried to imagine. He would marry someone, and make a home of his own, and he'd bring his own inevitable children to meet their uncle someday, until they grew old enough to begin asking questions, and he would let the cemetery fade quietly away from them. And what remained after that?

But that was still years to come.

Wirt did not wipe his eyes, but sat stationary until his grief drained away on its own. Flushed pink retained itself in a featherlike tumble of clouds just above the western ridge, and the brothers watched together as it dimmed, and drifted, and fell finally into the gray mouth of real night. Cars honked distantly. Somewhere outside the graveyard fence, a bottle smashed. Wirt began to turn away, and Greg felt him release the fist he'd been holding tight in the space between them. He copied his older brother in slinging his legs back over the eastern side of the wall.

"I think I have to go," Wirt said, with his eyes on the train track. Greg had learned a long time ago not to try and insist otherwise, but this wasn't how he wanted things to end. He smiled, as real and big as he could.

"I can't wait for next year," he said, and made himself insistent enough that Wirt smiled too. "I'm gonna kick school's butt and go live in a yurt on an arts commune, and you're going to end up with the cutest baby in the world. Any world." He made sure to give his brother a preemptive shove before he could say something about keeping his excitement checked. "You'll have a fierce wife and lots of help and the best family possible. And you'll have dowels, as far as the eye can see. No student loans to master that skill."

Wirt chuckled, "Cut it out," but when Greg stood to grab the overhanging branch, he still watched with bittersweet bearing. "I really am glad you could come again," he said. "I always am."

"Of course I came," Greg laughed. He stepped down to the first limb on the oak trunk. "I'll never outgrow my big brother." Wirt's smile arrived unprompted this time. "Say hi to Beatrice for me, right? Her, the baby, do that stomach-talking thing… The in-laws, too. All the Millers. Pretend I mentioned each of them by name."

"I will," Wirt promised. "I always do."

His form was charcoaled by evening. Twilight laid purple on blue on black. The air was cool and the stars were emergent and his brother's aspect, even in the dark, was changeable only by fault of his own memory. Greg lingered on the tree, just for a minute, for the sake of the long year ahead, and finally nodded and offered a sloppy salute.

"Happy Halloween, brother." Greg said.

Wirt returned the salute with possibly worse form. "Happy Halloween, Greg."

And Greg climbed back down to his side of the wall, and Wirt took a moment to look at the sky before descending into his.


End file.
